RACE RELATIONS

RACE RELATIONS; King's Heritage

By TAYLOR BRANCH; Taylor Branch wrote ''Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63.''

Published: September 30, 1990

In death, as in life, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been plastered over thickly with labels: Christian martyr, dreamer, Communist, the black Moses, De Lawd, national hero, womanizer and saint, among others. A multiplicity of names carries great meaning. It is significant that Dr. King's formal birth name, Michael, was changed to Martin Luther in 1934, when he was 5 years old, and it is also significant that the name of his people is once more the subject of internal debate - this time whether ''black'' should give way to ''African-American'' as ''Negro'' gave way to ''black'' some 22 years ago.

Unfortunately, labeling can block rather than facilitate discovery. We label things in order to blot them out. Because race can be so unbearably sensitive, admirers as well as detractors of the civil rights cause use names for self-protection - ''racist,'' ''militant,'' ''Uncle Tom.'' There is no explanation, resolution, satisfaction or atonement - only a banishment whose very swiftness suggests a fear of candid discussion.

Segregationists controlled most of the labeling machinery during the early years of Dr. King's brief career.

The civil rights movement took us deep into fundamental questions about democratic practice. That is why we honor Dr. King, its leader, with a national holiday, and on this fourth observance, around what would have been his 60th birthday, we ought to try to apply the depth of his democratic commitment to our own times.

We need to ask ourselves: What does it mean that many whites of good will privately feel no hope for, nor empathy with, the urban black poor, and that many black politicians themselves are baffled by the underclass? Can a nation founded on self-government conclude that the pleasures and profits of drugs are irresistible to human nature?

Can we seriously believe that we may become the world's first nation to suffer economic decline from excessive generosity to its poor? Why is it that blacks and Jews, two peoples commonly devoted to the justice of the Mosaic prophets, are seen to be at one another's throats? Why is there virtually no competition in elections for the House of Representatives? Why are these issues absent from our recent campaigns?

Dr. King's life offers instruction in the underlying principles of democracy. As a schoolboy, he survived a bout of skepticism largely by adopting theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's theories of justice. Mr. Niebuhr defined justice as society's best approximation of perfect love.

Dr. King grounded his religious faith close to the Jeffersonian intuition on the equality of human spirits. ''We will win our freedom,'' he wrote in his ''Letter From Birmingham Jail'' in 1963, ''because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.''

On a more practical plane, Dr. King and some of the early members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee engaged in a classic debate over the appropriateness of princely leadership in a democratic cause. Often Dr. King confessed himself to be too caught up in the ramifications of his position, far behind the students in willingness to advance the cause by sacrifice or innovation.

At other times it was the students who were paralyzed, whereas Dr. King faced his casualties. He went straight to the families of the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963 and demanded that he be allowed to preach over the caskets. ''At times life is hard,'' he said at the group funeral, ''as hard as crucible steel.''

While the F.B.I. and several

Southern states collected thick political files on Dr. King's 1957 visit to Highlander [Folk School, in Tennessee, where blacks and whites were committed to social advancement] , they failed to preserve a word of what he said. They should have, however, for those words still ring true today.

He spoke of a skittish nation in which the best people, ''for fear of what they will be labeled,'' avoid discussion of the most vital questions. ''Channels of communication between whites and Negroes are now closed,'' said Dr. King, who was then 28. ''Certainly this is tragic. Men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don't know each other. They don't know each other because they can't communicate with each other. They can't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.''